A Role for Social Design Experiments in School Gentrification Research

• In Event: 21.034 - Neighborhood Gentrification and Schools: Implications for Equity and Diversity

Abstract

Dual immersion (DI) bilingual programs and gentrification have raised concerns about inequities in programs joining diverse students and families (Cervantes-Soon, Et. Al., 2017; Posey-Maddox, Kimelberg, & Cucchiara, 2014). This work describes initial project activities and findings from a Social Design Experiment (SDE) that seeks to mitigate the negative aspects of gentrification while fomenting integration and intercultural collaboration. I argue for Social Design Experiments as a valuable methodology in school gentrification research.

SDE merges Design Research with Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). Design Research investigates learning in authentic social contexts with participants as co-investigators and iterative cycles of design, implementation, and evaluation (Design-Based Research Collective, 2003). CHAT, meanwhile, links individuals’ learning and identity formation with the current and historical contexts informing the activity systems of participants’ routines and interactions (Cole & Engestrom, 1993). Gutiérrez & Vossoughi (2010) characterize SDE as “oriented toward transformative ends through mutual relations of exchange…this interventionist research maintains that change in the individual involves change in the social situation itself,” (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010, 101). Thus, interventions resulting from collaborative inquiry resist pathologizing groups or individuals and are framed as re-mediations, “a reorganization of the entire ecology of learning,” (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010, 102).

SDE research privileges multi-sited ethnography to understand the complexities and contradictions within activity systems (Gutiérrez, 2016, p. 192). Èmerson, Fretz, and Shaw (2011) encourage ethnographers’ immersion in participants’ routines in order to better understand the routines and constraints, alongside participants’ understandings of these. Thus, throughout this project, I relied on participatory ethnography in classroom observations (four days/week, six hours/day, for one academic year); PTA and Community School Council meetings and events; Instructional Leadership Team meetings; and ethnographic conversations with school administrators, parents, and students inside and outside the school.

Ethnographic observation was complemented by semi-structured interviews with teachers and parents about their attitudes toward bilingual education, their experiences and understandings about the school’s demographic shifts, experiences with gentrification, and opportunities for equitable integration. Additionally, 8th grade students conducted a community study on gentrification, gathering insights through interviews with family, community residents, business owners, and school district officials.

Data collection identified family displacement due to increasing cost of living; school climate; and test-driven, anglocentric, teacher-centered pedagogies as hindrances to equitable participation in the DI program. Working through the school’s existing committees, re-mediations sought to reduce bullying through a student-led committee, holding meetings of the principals of several bilingual schools to put collective pressure on the school district to provide transportation for displaced families; and increase coherence and student-centered collaborative learning and biliteracy development by piloting the aforementioned unit with 8th grade and placing student-centered teaching practice at the core of the school-based professional development for the 2018-19 academic year. It is too early to evaluate these interventions, but their implementation and the surrounding conversations show how Social Design Experiments leverage the time and expertise of researchers with the knowledge, experience, and commitment of participants at the school site to identify and address the pressing challenges of gentrification.

Author

• Luis Ernesto Poza, San José State University